Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets – Review

In this adaptation of Evan Roskos’ YA novel of the same title, James Whitfield (Lucas Jade Zumann) has a lot to contend with: a miserable home life, crippling social anxiety, an obsession with his poetic near-namesake Walt Whitman, a near-hopeless crush on his classmate Sophie (a charming Taylor Russell, previously seen in Escape Room), and the mystery behind his sister’s disappearance the previous year. Most, if not all of these things, are either causes of, or caused by, his mental health issues. In several cases, it’s both. But, with his quasi-Fascistic father The Brute (Jason Isaacs in yet another charismatic and layered, if fairly small, rôle) unable to afford therapy, he’s forced to resort to getting therapy from an imaginary talking bird named Dr. Bird.

So far, so quirky. The YA genre has seen many such scenarios, in novels for and about intelligent yet troubled young men. Many of them have even had film adaptations: Everything Is Illuminated, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I Am Not a Serial Killer. However, while many of the same story ingredients are present here – teen angst; young love; worries about sex; allusions to classic literature and film, concepts out of physics, geometry, and anything else that can trick teenagers into reading educational material (“What would Walt Whitman do? Probably jerk off in a field and then write a poem about it”: this line alone should account for a small spike in sales of Leaves of Grass)  – Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets distinguishes itself from the crowd by abruptly changing gears into a completely different sort of film altogether.

To reveal more would be to spoil some of the fun that comes with the way the picture freely collages together a number of different types of story into an oddly coherent, even witty, whole. But look out for the precise point this switch occurs: it’s almost exactly halfway through.